by DIANA CARIBONI
IMAGE/ Lisa Sánchez
Attacking those searching for missing loved ones is ‘particularly despicable’ politics, says activist Lisa Sánchez
More than 5,600 mass graves have been found in Mexico since 2007, and there are more than 72,000 unidentified bodies in the country’s morgues, while 127,000 people are reported missing. Yet the state denies that disappearance is a systematic and widespread crime and stigmatises those who denounce it, Mexican activist and security researcher Lisa Sánchez told openDemocracy.
Enforced disappearance is not new in Mexico. But it has been normalised in part by the violence triggered by the militarisation of the ‘war on drugs’ – formally launched under the government of the right-wing National Action Party’s (PAN) Felipe Calderón between 2006 and 2012, and intensified by his successors.
The crime now has an impunity rate of 99%, explained Sánchez, the director general of Mexico United Against Crime (MUCD), a civil society organisation working on citizen security, justice and drug policy, in an interview held as the national and international conversation around Mexico’s disappearances intensified.
In recent weeks, the media circus surrounding the discovery of an alleged cartel training and extermination site in the state of Jalisco has led to a campaign of attacks on the families searching for their loved ones, which Sánchez described as “particularly despicable”.
And on 5 April, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances decided for the first time to open a procedure for the case of Mexico and activate Article 34 of the International Convention against Enforced Disappearances. This involves requesting further information from the government “on the allegations received, which in no way prejudges the next steps in the proceedings” and, eventually, referring the matter to the General Assembly. For the committee’s experts, who have been studying the case for a decade, there are indications of a “systematic and widespread” practice.
Mexico’s Senate responded by rejecting the committee’s decision and asking the UN to sanction its president, Olivier De Frouville – a response approved by the country’s ruling left-wing party, the National Regeneration Movement (usually referred to as Morena).
“The Senate vote made me lose a lot of my morale,” Sánchez said. The following is an excerpt from our interview, which has been translated into English and edited for length, clarity and style.
openDemocracy: In Latin America, disappearance is identified as a state crime committed by authoritarian governments in previous decades. Why are there so many disappeared people in Mexico in the current context?
Lisa Sánchez: Mexico is an exception in Latin America because, although it had an authoritarian government [ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI, between 1929 and 2000], it was not the result of a coup d’état, and therefore there was no military dictatorship. The disappearances that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s were considered a state crime at a time of political persecution of socialist dissidents, whom the PRI, allied with the United States, pursued very vigorously because it considered them a threat to national security.
Although the Mexican left always rejected these disappearances and considered them a state crime, we never had a process of memory recovery as part of our national debate. Much less did we punish the perpetrators, although in recent years we have inaugurated a couple of truth commissions on the crimes of the ‘dirty war’. But in reality, the disappearances never faced collective, real, large-scale and organised rejection, as they did in South America.
Do you see a link between the failure to acknowledge this past and this new type of disappearance in the context of drug-related violence?
In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no, but I bring it up because the fact that we didn’t go through revisiting that painful reality during our transition to democracy allowed our governments to continue with the narrative that it was not a state policy. And that’s problematic because it is what we are seeing today.
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